Momentary lapses of reason?
Skating away?
Learning to fly?
Naaah ... just too old to rock'n'roll, too young to ...

Saturday, May 04, 2013

Evolution

I
was a dinosaur.

Not,
alas, a snarling male-fantasy T-Rex, or even a velociraptor.

I
was a brontosaurus. Or perhaps a mastodon. Slow, ponderous, quite content to
wallow in turbid swamps as long as there was enough forage available. Not
succulent greens, but paper. More enticing, more delicious than the freshest
ambrosia. To wit, books.

Growing
up, the keenest pleasure I experienced came on every alternate Saturday. My
grandfather would take us to the British Council Library on Theatre Road, where
there was a whole section devoted to children’s books. (It no longer exists;
Attila the Hen cut down the funding for British missions worldwide, and the
children’s section was one of the first casualties.) My cousin and I would
fight tooth and nail over the library cards, gleefully raid the shelves and
then, on the ride home, finger the books lustfully, barely able to contain the
excitement, the anticipation, the sheer joy of having so many books to read.

Books.

Paper
and glue and printing ink, the texture of the old leather on the spine, the
crispness of the pages against the fingers, the unique smell – whether the
brash presence of a new book like the perfume of a parvenu, or the more muted,
musty, faintly apologetic miasma of old books – all adding up to the sheerest
magic. The FEEL of books as much as their content. The purest pleasure I have
known.

And
yet ... This morning I realised that it has been WEEKS since I read a book from
cover to cover. The long shelf facing the bathroom gathers dust. My last three
visits to bookstores were for book launches – where I did not pause to browse
the shelves. I have been seduced by e-books.

In
the first week of January this year, the Wall Street Journal published a bout
of the sheerest havering, citing irrelevant statistics and using contradictory
arguments to argue that e-books are no threat to paper-and-ink publishing. A
year ago, this dinosaur would have thrown his weight behind this argument, but
not now. Not since I was bought over.

First,
I moved from a laptop to a tablet. Then I discovered the seductive convenience
of reading a book that I can adjust to my own requirements. After years of
badly-bound paperbacks with barely legible fonts, I can now change the size of
the font and often the font itself to my convenience. I no longer have to prise
apart the book to read the ends of sentences that run into the spine. I don’t
even need a bookmark, since the e-book will automatically open to the point
where I left off reading the last time.

After
such knowledge, what forgiveness?

There’s
more. A generous friend has shared with me his entire library of e-books. All.
Forty. Thousand. Of. Them! All of them put together take up a little part of a
hard drive which is itself no bigger than ONE old Bantam paperback. 40,000
books! To put this in perspective, my father and I have been at our combined
wits’ end to accommodate our collection of some 7000 books (not including his
treasured edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which always has its own
place next to his armchair!) No bookshelves, no cartons, no trunks too heavy to
be lifted. Just a hard drive and a tablet.

And
the clinching argument – when I’m reading an e-book through the night, the page
is back-lit. Ergo, no need to keep the light on, and no squeals of complaint
from the Better Half!

Yep, the idea of moving some 500 odd books across the country is what finally made me buy me a kindle. You left out the permanency part though.. got a 70 year old version of the Arabian nights from my grandfather some days ago ..trying to keep the pages from folding away into shreds gets annoying after a while!